


Switch On The Sky And The Stars Glow For You

by AllISeeAreKingsAndThieves



Category: The Sims (Video Games), 僕のヒーローアカデミア | Boku no Hero Academia | My Hero Academia
Genre: Alternate Universe - Video Game World, Aromantic Asexual Shigaraki Tomura | Shimura Tenko, Crack Treated Seriously, Dabi is Todoroki Touya, EA meet me in the pit, Gen, I’m a huge nerd; you’re unfortunately going to get lore, Kurogiri is Shirakumo Oboro, League of Villains as Family (My Hero Academia), Manga Spoilers, Memory Loss, Nonbinary Kurogiri (My Hero Academia), Swearing, Team Bonding, The Sims game used is a hypothetical future game, Video Game Mechanics, but it might align with someone else’s interests, fused with all the parts I think are the best from other Sims games, the game is set in the timeline between Sims 3 and The Sims, this is entirely self-indulgent, video game lore
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-22
Updated: 2021-01-31
Packaged: 2021-03-09 05:55:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 17,539
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27149029
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AllISeeAreKingsAndThieves/pseuds/AllISeeAreKingsAndThieves
Summary: The League of Villains runs afoul of an individual with a video game quirk and winds up trapped in a life simulator. The video game threatens to keep them trapped there until they complete the main quest- but what’s a main quest in The Sims?Tomura Shigaraki is determined to get them all back on track, but his teammates seem less interested in getting back to the world they left behind.
Relationships: Other Relationship Tags to Be Added
Comments: 71
Kudos: 99





	1. Exporting Save File

**Author's Note:**

> If we’re going to be completely honest, this is a wildly self-indulgent recap of the absolute nonsense the League gets up to in my Sims save file. I’m mashing together other mechanics from other games in the franchise as a whole to let them have a bit more freedom as well as making the assumption that EA will still be putting out Sims games in whatever future where BnHA takes place, plus I’m adding a smattering of plot, just to make it interesting.

Tomura Shigaraki can’t remember how he got here. To be fair, he’s been realizing over the past few days that he can’t remember a lot of things- but those are usually past things, like the perfume his mother wore or the sound of his grandfather’s laugh. Those are things that won’t really mess up his day-to-day life. 

However, right now he’s standing on a sidewalk in a pretty little suburb that looks bizarrely Western and he can’t remember how he got here, which is, to be completely frank, a big fucking issue. He doesn’t know where ‘here’ is. He’s sure he was just... Actually, he’s not even sure where he _was_. He thinks maybe he was in the middle of fighting Re-Destro. But he remembers the way his hands crunched in the man’s grip and- he flexes his fingers to check- he doesn’t feel anything wrong with them. Making false memories or whatever it’s called? Big. Fucking. Issue.

The other problem is that he’s alone. That’s not usually a bad thing; it’s been harder to get some peace and quiet around the League lately. But he’s in unfamiliar territory on his own, disoriented and confused, and his solitude seems dangerous in that regard. It’s like what they did at the USJ- divide and conquer. 

He scratches at his face. Nerves are making his skin feel like it’s full of bugs, crawling around just underneath his flesh. Scratching is the only thing that helps when he gets like this, even if he has to scratch patches of skin right off. 

Still scratching, he takes a step forward, off the sidewalk and onto the swath of green grass before him. Though there’s a house across the street and one a few meters or so away, he’s standing on an empty plot. On his other side as the land slopes down, there’s a town. Beyond that, there’s the sea. He thinks he can faintly hear the waves crashing.

It’s when he turns back to look at the sidewalk that he sees the mirage. It looks like a mirage anyway, like the heat coming off the cement has formed some kind of picture the way things are supposed to in the desert. But, instead of it looking like water or an oasis, he thinks he’s looking at his own face.

Cautiously, he approaches it, now itching at his throat. The image remains in place, hovering at about waist height above the concrete. Mirages are supposed to disappear when you get too close, aren’t they? But now that he’s close, he can see the image of himself, wearing a small and slightly crooked half-smile that he _knows_ he doesn’t wear in public. It must be doctored, but it’s really convincing. They even got the birthmark under his lip.

Dropping his hand from his neck, he spreads his fingers out and takes a swipe at the image of his face. He’s expecting it to dissolve into dust or, at the very least, waver and disappear. He’s not expecting words to pop up above it in a video game style speech bubble. 

The writing’s backwards, so he has to squint at it and then shuffle closer to really get a good look. But when he can make it out, the bottom seems to drop out of his stomach. 

_Tenko Shimura,_ say the words. Underneath, in smaller letters, he thinks it says _Alias: Tomura Shigaraki_. 

He retreats back onto the grass, watching as the speech bubble hangs in the air a moment, then closes and disappears. 

“Sensei?” he calls. It has to be Sensei, doesn’t it? After all, Sensei’s the only one still alive who remembers Tenko Shimura. 

He turns in all directions, trying to find some camera. This must be some sort of lesson, he reasons. There are likely microprojectors hidden in the street to create that effect. Maybe Sensei’s gotten himself out of Tartarus and wants Tomura to prove himself again. 

His stomach twists. Maybe Sensei had wanted Tomura to get him out of prison. Maybe this is a punishment.

“Sensei?” he asks again, more tentative than before. “Where are you? What do you want me to do?” 

There’s no response. A gentle ocean breeze wafts over his face, ruffling his hair the way Sensei might have if he were here, if Tomura had done what was expected of him. There are voices in the distance, but they’re too far away to be anything but white noise. 

The longer he’s left without a response, the more his anxiety dissolves into annoyance. If this is any kind of test, it must be a test of his patience. He hates those. Being patient makes him itch worse.

“This is stupid,” he grumbles, sitting down on the sidewalk discontentedly. A weight in his coat pocket pulls when he does and he reaches into it with his ring and little fingers tucked into his palm. His fingertips brush a cool, smooth surface. As he touches it, it starts to hum threateningly.

It’s a cell phone. An unfamiliar one too. Dangling it from his fingers, he squints at the screen. The number is unknown, but Sensei has never had a proper contact. Tomura can’t remember Sensei even having a cell phone. It’s not his style.

He goes to toss it away into the grass. Before he can flick his wrist to throw it, another text bubble blooms out from the screen. “You have been chosen,” it reads. “They will come soon.”

The message doesn’t make any sense. He rereads it again. Who will come soon? The rest of his league? More yakuza? _Heroes?_

As he stares, the text bubble disappears back into the phone. _You have one unread text message,_ it says, as if nothing at all is strange about any of this.

He swipes away the notification and tries to remember the number for Toga’s phone. She still has one that she favors, though she’s also taken Dabi’s advice to get some burner phones, and Tomura knows he has the number memorized so he can call her back when she’s gone somewhat rogue. He navigates to the phone icon and then just stares. 

This phone doesn’t have an icon to open a keypad for typing in a phone number. But what’s frankly stranger is that his contact list is under the heading ‘Relationships’ instead. Still worse is the fact that the only contact in it is that of something labeled Services.

For lack of anything else to do, he taps it.

Another bubble pops up- this time a list with fat blue-black lettering on white boxes- and nearly bashes him in the chin. He jerks his head back, spitting a curse. 

Maid, butler, gardener, nanny- but no league. He could make a joke about Kurogiri fitting at least two of those labels, but he’s not much interested in jokes and he’s also unpleasantly aware that Kurogiri’s gone. Kurogiri’s gone and his league is gone and Tomura hasn’t been truly alone in years, not since he was small and unwanted. 

His skin crawls and he gives in to the itch as he tries to strategize. He could just start walking, he reasons. Eventually he’ll have to reach somewhere with people who can give him directions.

“Hi!” says a cheerful voice. 

Tomura whirls, lifting his hands threateningly. 

Where there had been no one before, three people stand a few paces away from him, all three smiling. The one in the middle holds a covered plate. 

“We saw you show up,” says the left hand person. “Thought we’d come out and give you a good old Sunset Valley welcome.” There’s something odd about his voice, like he’s saying two things at once. 

“Is that where I am?” Tomura rasps, lowering his hands. The three don’t seem afraid of him, so he doubts Sunset Valley is anywhere near Japan. Anyone who’s Japanese would know him on sight.

Something sparks up above their heads at his words, but vanishes before he can get a good look at it. The right hand person, a woman, says with the same double voice, “Of course, silly! Did you buy the land without knowing where it was?”

“Good luck with this place,” interrupts the middle person. “Here, we brought you fruitcake.”

The plate is pushed into his chest and he takes it instinctively, pinkies out to prevent dissolving it. The fruitcake in question looks like a lump of mud. He’s tempted to dissolve it. “Do you have any idea how I got here?”

“You appeared!” says the man helpfully.

“Whoosh!” the woman adds. “I’m Lisa, by the way.”

“Shigaraki,” he hears himself say, still staring at the fruitcake in disbelief.

“Welcome to Sunset Valley, Shigaraki!” Lisa tells him. “These are my housemates, VJ and Magnus.”

The middle person lifts a hand at the former name and the man winks at the latter. The two of them both wear their hair in spikes, making pale blonde Lisa look small beside them.

“If anyone gives you any trouble, you let us know,” Lisa continues. 

“What country are we in?” he asks, staring at the fruitcake like he could make it dissolve with only the power of his eyes.

VJ scrubs a hand over the black stubble surrounding their spiky blue hair. “You buy this place while all hopped up on juice or something?”

The double voices are giving him a headache. “No,” he says shortly. 

The little images pop up over their heads- little red marks that vanish too quickly to be sure. He thinks they might have been people. 

“We’ll leave you alone then,” says Magnus smoothly. “We have work to do and it seems you might too, if you don’t want to be sleeping on a park bench tonight.”

Tomura’s slept on worse, so the barb doesn’t bother him. Instead he turns his back on the three and drops the plate with the fruitcake into the grass. Alarmingly, the force of the blow doesn’t even jostle it and it just sits there rather malevolently. 

“How far am I from Japan?” he asks.

He’s not sure who answers, but what they say seems more important. “Japan? That’s all the way across the sea, pal. How’d you get here?”

The phone buzzes before he can turn any of the three to dust. He seizes it, ignoring them to stare at the face lighting up the screen. The contact reads “The Games-Master” and there’s an image of a person dressed in what looks like a morph suit and a trench coat above the words. _Definitely_ not Sensei. 

One of those speech bubbles pops up above the phone and his instinct is to close his hand around it. Instead, he grits his teeth and glares. 

_The Games-Master is calling! Would Tomura Shigaraki like to chat?_

A simple yes/no hologram appears up underneath the bubble. 

He presses yes, though he suspects the answer is actually no. 

When a shrill cackle pierces his eardrums, he knows his suspicion was correct. “Greetings, Shigaraki Tomura!” shrieks the voice on the other end of the phone. “I assume you’re-“

“Shut up,” Tomura snaps. “Where are my allies? Where am I?”

The voice pauses a moment, then says reproachfully, “I can’t shut up _and_ answer questions, you know.”

“Then pick one fast,” Tomura says, letting a growl creep into his already raspy voice.

“The League of Villains is probably still stuck in the loading screen,” the voice says thoughtfully. “Maybe you got to skip it because you’re the leader or you don’t have as much cool content.”

He bristles at that- he’s plenty cool, thanks- but his attention is captured by something else. “Loading screen?”

“Yeah.” The little shit sounds smug as they say, “My quirk’s called Player Character. If I can catch you, I can export you into a video game and you get to be in it until you finish the main quest.”

That.. that sounds like his kind of quirk, actually. It sounds easy enough to beat at least. Tomura looks around again, trying to figure out which game this is. Maybe it’s like Street Fighter? There’s certainly a street, though the three people heading away from him down the road don’t look like combatants. They definitely didn’t act like they were looking for a fight. He knows Spinner’s into Grand Theft Auto, so if he can find Spinner, maybe they can figure out a tutorial between the two of them for the rest of the team. 

(It’s definitely not Animal Crossing or Pokémon and Shigaraki definitely doesn’t know that because he has a secret passion for both games that only Kurogiri knows about, nope, not him.)

“And what game is this?” Tomura asks finally, when he doesn’t recognize the houses or the street even still. “What’s the main quest?”

Before the mystery voice can answer, the rest of the League appears on the sidewalk around him, fading into being like ghosts. 

Toga squeals as soon as she sees him and races over to pull on his sleeve. “Tomu-chan, there you are! We thought you were dead in a ditch!”

“Where were you?” he demands in return, covering the phone speaker with the palm of his hand and letting her and Twice tug him to his feet.

“We were trying to find you,” Toga says, skipping around him. Her knife flashes in her hand and her cat yellow eyes glint in the sunlight. 

“Were we?” Dabi wonders. Despite his bored tone, he’s giving Tomura the same sort of quick once-over he gives Toga when she comes back from one of her solo missions. Mister once referred to it as his older brother instinct and Dabi nearly set him on fire for it.

“Yeah, uh, Shigaraki,” Spinner ventures, tying his bandanna tighter around his shock of pink hair. “There’s something really weird about all of this.”

“We were stuck in these frozen scenes!” Twice cries, tugging on the hem of his mask. “We couldn’t move! I had to itch my nose so badly!”

Tomura barely hears any of them because he’s looking past them at Mister Compress. The masked man is looking down the street, every atom intent on whatever it is he’s seeing. His body- and his overlarge hat- blocks Tomura’s view of his object of interest and Toga and Twice have hemmed him in so that he can’t move to get a better look.

There are footsteps approaching them, the gentle thump of soles on concrete. Then Mister rushes forward to clasp the hands of.. oh.

“Big Sis Mag!” Toga screams. Tomura forgotten, she pelts around him, past Mister, and leaps into the arms of her friend.

“Big Sis!” Twice wails, running to join her in Magne’s embrace. 

Magne laughs and grabs the both of them up in her arms, her sunglasses getting pushed up her face by Twice’s skull and revealing her glittering eyes. She looks so relaxed as she whispers something to Toga and gives Twice a squeeze. Twice is wailing like a lost kid in a department store and the sound grates at Tomura.

“What the hell is this?” he rasps, letting his hand fall from the phone speaker so he can better address the subject of his wrath. “Magne’s dead. She _died_. What is that?”

The Games-Master makes a sound that seems like the auditory equivalent of a shrug. “Maybe I saved her earlier save under the same file as the rest of you.”

“What does that mean?” he asks, watching Magne put her sunglasses on Toga’s head as she talks eagerly to Twice. They seem to be filling her in on everything.

“It means that I must have caught her before she died, stupid.” Tomura decides he’s going to decay this kid as soon as he gets out of here. “She’s as real as the rest of you.”

Magne lifts her head to look at him, smiling that bright, familiar smile and Tomura pays no attention to how the sight makes something seize in his shriveled black heart. He’d had no reason to believe he’d ever see Magne again in any form. So he has no reason to be seeing her now. He hardens his heart against the sight of her.

“Hey, Shigaraki,” she says playfully. “I brought you someone.”

And then Kurogiri is stepping out from behind her to stand at her elbow, their arms folded behind their back, and their yellow eyes are watching him with the mischief they reserved most often for Tomura aged six to ten, when he was just old enough to want tricks and mischief. They look pressed and neat in their black tie and dark button-up. But Kurogiri is in Tartarus- Kurogiri is being brainwashed by heroes. 

“Get rid of them,” he snarls into the phone, ignoring the ache in his chest. “I don’t work with rip-off characters.”

Magne’s face falls and Kurogiri shakes their head and Tomura turns his back on them because he’ll be sick if he has to look at dead Magne and captured Kurogiri for one more minute. 

“Sucks to be you because they’re all I’ve got and you’ll need a full party to make it through,” the kid- it’s definitely some kid- retorts. “Go kill a dragon. Maybe you’ll feel better.”

“No dragons in a suburb, brat,” he answers, weaponizing his discomfort against their captor the way Sensei taught him. Anything that makes him upset should be destroyed. “Aren’t you the one playing the game?”

“Suburb?” There’s a clattering scrambling sound, like a hail of small objects. He hears a whirring and a few clicks- then a rapid fire tapping that he recognizes as a computer keyboard. Then the voice is back, so much closer than it was before. “I have to go.”

Tomura does _not_ like the sound of that. “No, no, you tell me what you meant, you little-”

The line goes dead.

Tomura Shigaraki looks up at his League and the two cheap copies of people they’ve lost and he feels that slithering itch under his skin. He needs to destroy something or destroy himself and he has to do it _now_.

“So,” Dabi says as Tomura stares into nothingness with murderous intent scrawled across his features and a cellphone hanging limply from his fingers. “Are we dead?”

“No,” Tomura says, rounding on him. “But you had better hope there’s a fucking dragon soon or you’re going to be.” 

Dabi narrows his eyes at him. Then, looking around like the threat doesn’t even faze him (and it probably doesn’t, the bastard), he sighs and says, “Knew it was too good to be true.”

“Can it,” he answers, glancing over his shoulder to watch as the fake Kurogiri and fake Magne talk to the other three. They look so real. “If you had half the apathy you pretend to, I’d have destroyed you ages ago. No point in an ally without drive.”

“Okay,” Spinner says, wisely interrupting before Dabi can say anything else and lock the two of them in a verbal death match. “So. If we’re not dead, where are we?”

“Video game.” Tomura nearly jerks his thumb at the holographic projection of his own face, then catches himself. If they haven’t seen it, he doesn’t want to draw their attention. “The kid’s quirk is something to put us in a video game until we get the main quest done.”

Spinner brightens. He and Spinner are usually on the same page with games, though they’ve never had the chance to play together. “Cool, cool, alright. Which one though?”

That gets Tomura’s attention. “It’s not one of yours?”

Spinner gives everything a once-over. “I don’t have a game that starts like this,” he says, kind of uneasily. 

“It’s not GTA?” he asks uncertainly.

“Not with this color palette. It might have some kind of graphics malfunction or something, but GTA’s gritty. Also, why would it be set in a place like this?”

That’s not good. Spinner plays more video games than he does- Tomura had been counting on that wealth of knowledge. If he can’t provide a tutorial, then they’re playing this completely blind and Tomura has no idea whether or not they can die in real life if they fail. 

Tomura’s mind comes to a screeching halt. Over Spinner’s shoulder, he can see Dabi noticing the holograms. There are eight of them now, one for each League member, all lined up in a row. Fear shoots up his spine as Dabi squints at the projections and gets closer.

There’s a chance he won’t notice, right?

Spinner continues to talk, unaware of the way Dabi swipes at the holographic projections of the League and unaware of how Tomura’s fingernails dig into his palms. “I don’t mind, like, Pokémon, but this is one of those little construction simulators, right?” Spinner waves a hand around dismissively. “Like, Happy Home Town or something. You have to get all these tokens from a game and then go into build mode-“

At the precise moment that Spinner says the words ‘build mode,’ three things happen. The first is that Dabi’s eyes go wide and he jerks back from the projections as if he’s been burned. The second is that Tomura shoves Spinner aside, trying to get to Dabi to shut him up before good old Scarface says anything either of them will regret. 

The third is that the plot of grass before them starts glowing with a strange white light.

Pulled from their conversations, the League stands on the sidewalk, appraising this new turn of events. As they watch, the white light dims enough that they can make out the grid pattern it’s tracing over the grass. 

Tomura thinks of minefields and bomb squads and flexes his hands in preparation for completely annihilating some explosives. He’ll just decay them all away and finish the main quest, hitting two birds with one stone. Then they can get out, find the snot-nosed little creep who put them in here, and-

Mister Compress tilts his head and then announces, “It’s a blueprint,” as the light traces out its fading patterns over and over again through the grass.

Yanked from his murderous daydream, Tomura blinks. “What?”

“A blueprint.” Mister paces the perimeter, examining it. “An empty one, so it looks more like blueprint paper.” The mask that covers his face turns Tomura’s way and, obviously mistaking his bewilderment for ignorance, Mister says patiently, “They’re for building houses.”

“I know what a blueprint is,” Tomura sneers. “You seem really certain.”

“I’ve seen several.” Absorbed in his observations, Mister says, “I haven’t seen one this large since my gentleman thief days though.”

Tomura doesn’t even _want_ to think about that. Instead he rolls his eyes, determining that the blueprint or whatever isn’t dangerous. All it means is that Spinner was right and this is some junky construction simulator. 

The thought of Spinner’s theory reminds him about Dabi though. Panic spiking in his chest, he turns back to where Dabi had been standing. The dumbass is still just standing there, his face ashen beneath the leathery purple scarring, making his obviously dyed black hair look even more fake.

“Hey,” he calls lowly, motioning at Dabi. “Get over here and get that stupid look off your face.”

“You sure we’re not in hell?” Dabi asks as he ambles over. “You’re absolutely sure?”

“Every day is hell with you involved,” he says firmly. Then, lowering his voice, he says, “Say anything at all about the name on there, bring it to anyone’s attention, and I will rot your guts out of you.”

The last remainders of Dabi’s apathetic façade crumble away and Tomura can’t deny the thrill of glee he gets at seeing the fear flit across Dabi’s face. He never gets this much of a rise out of him with his other threats. Dabi must see just how serious he is. For the first time since Tomura’s known him, he looks vulnerable. “You saw it?” he asks.

Tomura rolls his eyes at him. “Of course I saw it. But I’m not telling anyone. And if you know what’s good for you, you won’t either.”

Dabi nods. His expression cools back into its mask of bored disdain. “Sure. Whatever.” When Tomura stares fiercely at him for a moment longer, just to try and hammer it into his burnt skull, Dabi sighs and stares out over the grass, down at the little town below them. “Thanks, I guess.”

That’s.. unexpected. Dabi doesn’t thank people and Dabi _definitely_ does not thank him unless he’s plotting something. He doesn’t have time to act on his suspicions before fake-Magne calls, “Shigaraki?”

“What?” he asks, turning to her. 

She points up. He follows her gesture.

Oh. That’s disarming. 

A flock of birds hover above them, motionless in the air. Their wings are outstretched. The whole flock is still.

It’s looking at them that makes Tomura realize that the breeze has stopped too. He looks across the water and finds that the trees on the opposite bank have been caught mid-rustle. There’s a leaf centimeters from touching down on the river and it’s just hanging there.

“Everything’s paused,” he says aloud. Unease slithers through him. The birds and the way they hang like that makes it all real. This is some kind of fucked-up quirk, game or not, and his team is caught in it.


	2. Opening Credits

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Toga is knows where they are and Tomura learns a host of new information.

The birds hang above them like a demented baby mobile as the League confers. Tomura lets Spinner explain to the others about the kid and the quirk and their objective while he stands with his back to the picture of himself, obscuring it with the folds of his heavy black coat so he doesn’t have to look at his own smiling face. He’s at least comforted by the fact that the others have similarly smiling portraits, even Dabi, whose image looks decidedly less imposing with a lopsided grin on his face. Another small mercy is that, if no one touches the portraits, their names won’t pop up over their heads. So Tomura will just stand here. Just guard them so no one sees anything more than they should.

He should have counted on Toga’s curiosity.

She comes prowling over to his side, not noticing the subtle way he shifts to hide his portrait. There’s a thoughtful twist to her features as she considers her own smiling picture, hanging at waist height for her. Then she taps a finger to it. Her name bubbles up above her head. 

A slow, sly smile bares her sharp fangs. Her hand flashes out, smacking the flat of her palm to her image’s forehead and drawing back just as quickly.

In response to the smack, the screen shimmers. From their places a few paces down the sidewalk, Spinner and Dabi jump away from the grass. A new set of windows has opened up beside them, sending Toga running over to look. 

“Ooh,” she squeals, standing on the edge of the sidewalk and looking at the pop-up windows in fascination. “Hey, Tomu-chan, guess what?”

“No,” he says reflexively, well aware of how she and Twice have caught him with that before.

“No fun,” she sulks a moment. Then she beams, too delighted by her revelation to let him get her down for long. “I know where we are!” she sings.

“Yeah?” He perks up. He hadn’t anticipated Toga to be much of a gamer, but she’s in a different demographic than him and Spinner. She might have a different range of knowledge.

She backs up off the sidewalk and into the street. Before her heel can even touch the cement, her body bounces back, skidding over the sidewalk and into the grass. Her movement makes the blueprint ripple. 

A screen, much like the ones that bear their names and faces, hurtles up out of the ground, displaying a white diagram of a house. The screens with their names and faces drop in response. 

Toga, unfazed by how the house screen had nearly clipped her nose, reaches up for it and starts tapping. “We’re in one of my favorite games,” she says matter-of-factly, as if she hadn’t just ricocheted off some invisible force field. “I have it on my phone!”

When she taps on a tab beside the house diagram, the diagram vanishes, replaced by the image of a saw and hammer. She taps this and then, dropping into a crouch, drags her fingers along the ground. 

“I knew it was Happy Home Town!” Spinner exclaims.

Toga gives him a look of mild contempt over her shoulder as she makes a turn to draw a new corner. Wherever her fingertips touch, the white lines glow green. “Spinner, it’s The Sims,” she says exasperatedly. “Haven’t you ever played it?”

Tomura cuts in before Spinner can defend himself. “Toga, what the hell is The Sims?”

“Your sensei really never let you have any fun, did he?” fake-Magne remarks.

Tomura ignores her. Just the sound of her voice makes his skin crawl, like he’s back watching Overhaul murder her again. It’s easier to ignore her.

“So, Sims is, like, based on this _really_ old American game. You can make your character and give them any life you want. You can give them the prettiest house, the best job, and all the money in the entire world.” Toga finishes dragging her fingers along the grass and stands up, clapping her hands together to get rid of imaginary dirt. Then she taps the little check mark that has popped up before her. 

With a rattling click, a grey box springs up out of the grass. A roof materializes on top of it. It doesn’t look like much and Toga probably sees that observation plain as day on Tomura’s face because her cheerful expression falters a little.

“I don’t like building,” she says sheepishly. “I like to make my characters live in the big fancy houses, so I kill all the previous owners and make a really cute backyard graveyard out of them.”

Deciding he’s never letting her near his Animal Crossing village, he asks, “What’s the main quest?”

“Um.” Toga looks around, then taps on the screen in front of her again for lack of anything better to do. “Well, I think it depends on the game. The one on my phone has little mini quests?”

“It’s kind of an open world game, I think,” fake-Magne says. “You don’t have a time limit or a set goal. You just keep playing.”

Tomura’s stomach lurches. He can’t even pretend to ignore that. If that’s true, then the kid trapped them here with no hope of escape. “Oh.”

“Well, you can pretend that your sim’s lifetime wish is your main quest,” Toga says, taking pity on him. “I guess the guy who put us in here made us the main household, so you can find it in your profile. Just go and tap on your name.”

“The screen closed,” Tomura reminds her, definitely not willing to go do battle with the picture of ‘Tenko Shimura’.

“Mm, nope, just collapses if you’re not using it in build mode. A lot of the cheats are based on your family name or household name, so you can pull up your character portraits if you need them.”

“I got it,” Dabi says lowly. From his spot, he can see the little portrait tab and so, with a quick yank, he reaches out and pulls up his own profile. A pop-up window blips into being before him. “It’s, uh, undecided.” He kicks the portrait tab closed again and grabs the sides of the pop-up window to bring it closer to his face. “Lotta stuff in here.”

“You should pick one!” Toga says cheerfully, flipping through paint colors. “Anyone want to come help me decorate? I think we should live in a castle!”

“Oh dear,” fake-Kurogiri mumbles, hurrying over to her side, probably to do damage control the way the real Kurogiri would. 

“These are stupid,” Dabi says, scrolling a little ways. Tomura can’t see the options from here, but he can see the sullen expression Dabi’s wearing. “Why are there so many and somehow all of them are stupid?”

“None of them say ‘murder Endeavor,’ huh?” Spinner teases, having recovered somewhat from Toga’s disdain.

“No,” Dabi mutters darkly. Then he raises his voice. “Toga, what’s the worst that’ll happen if I let the randomize button pick?”

Toga stops setting down stonework, much to Kurogiri’s evident relief, and skips over to peek at his screen. “Well, I like the romantic ones, but there’s a lot of really hard ones! Like the ones where you have to befriend unicorns! Unicorns are _really_ difficult to make like you! But they let you set fire to things!”

“I can set fire to things anyway,” Dabi points out, putting a finger on her face and pushing her away when she gets too close. 

“Yeah, but that’s _outside_ the game,” Toga says, with the long-suffering air of an underpaid teacher. “They could only program so many quirks _in_ -game. And before quirks, they only did fantasy things. So. Unicorns.”

“And death rays,” fake-Magne puts in. “I remember the death ray animations.”

“You two know a lot about this game,” Tomura notes, wondering if he can go and look at the screen as well without worrying about one of the nosier members of his team wanting a look at his portrait when it pops back up. 

“Spinner knows a lot about Grand Theft Auto and you know a lot about those magic games you like,” Toga counters. “I like playing Sims, so I know about it. And Magne liked to watch me play, so she knows some stuff too, huh, Big Sis?”

Fake-Magne makes a so-so gesture. “I mostly just listened to her and looked up some things. Shigaraki, why don’t you come over here? I’m sure we could use your leadership on this.”

“Hey, I can pick my life goal on my own, thanks,” Dabi protests, but Toga waves at Tomura to come and look anyway and Dabi makes no motion to stop her.

He can’t really refuse without it being noticeable, so he shoves his hands in his pockets, pinkies curled into his palms, and heads over.

The screen floating before Dabi is a little bigger than an average tablet. The entries in it are single line listings with tiny little symbols next to them. Not particularly reader friendly and this close, Tomura can see how Dabi keeps squinting at the screen.

“You should pick something easy if it’s your first time playing,” Twice says wisely before he goes to offer his help to Mister and the fake Kurogiri, who have joined forces to sketch out a new room.

“If you listen to Twice, you’re going to be stuck on the baby level of Guitar Hero forever,” Spinner informs them. “Pick something difficult so you can show it who’s boss!”

“We need to get out of here,” Shigaraki snaps. “Dabi, pick something simple.”

“Great ideas, guys,” Dabi drawls. “Really helpful. What the fuck is simple in this game?”

“Finding your soulmate’s pretty easy,” Toga volunteers. “You just get married and have a bunch of good dates.”

Dabi actually physically recoils at that. “Toga, I’m not falling in love with a collection of pixels on a screen,” he says flatly.

“Why not? People do it all the time!”

“Weird, lonely people do it!” he fires back. 

“It was made for you then, Dabi!” Spinner cries. 

“I’m not lonely but I’m definitely going to roast your organs,” Dabi threatens. 

“I think it would be a little strange for any of us to fall in love with a video game character,” Fake-Magne says tactfully. “Especially given that we’re going to wind up leaving anyway.”

“Oh and you’d have to be best friends with the person you marry,” Spinner notes, dodging Dabi’s swipe at him in order to look at the requirements more closely.

“Best friends _forever_ ,” Toga corrects. 

“I’m not doing it,” Dabi states, pointedly scrolling on. “If I get married, I’m doing it in the real world with a real person.”

“And we’ll make the speeches.” Toga looks as if she’s already dreaming up just the right speech, her eyes trained on the horizon.

“Bold of you to assume you’ll be invited.”

“How about cooking?” Fake-Magne suggests, patting an outraged Toga’s shoulder with one hand and indicating an entry on the list with the other. “You like cooking and if you’re the one cooking for us, you don’t have to worry about what’s in it.”

Tomura snorts despite himself. Letting Dabi cook sounds like a disaster, what with how flammable the guy is. 

He mentions as much, however, and the others look at him with some surprise. Spinner is the first one to make sense if it. “Oh,” he says. “You weren’t around for it, Shigaraki, but Dabi made us onigiri while you were out one time.”

“Yeah, and he made it _really_ cute too. Like little panda faces that you could bite.” Toga mimes taking a bite out of something, doing a little jerk of her head that Tomura thinks is meant to mime her then breaking said something’s neck, but he can’t be sure with her.

“He’s quite a catch, our Dabi,” Fake-Magne teases. Tomura remembers suddenly, irritatingly, that real Magne had a little bit of a crush on Dabi too. 

“Alright, enough,” Tomura says, annoyed. “Just because he made you onigiri once doesn’t mean anything.”

“I’m picking cooking,” Dabi announces because he just _lives_ to be a contrary nuisance. The corner of his mouth crooks up as he says, “Maybe Kurogiri will have the time to teach me now.”

“When did Kurogiri ever offer to teach you?” he demands. 

“Kurogiri literally offers to teach anyone to do anything,” Spinner says. “They taught me how to iron my shirts once.”

“They taught me how to make popsicles,” Toga volunteers. “I knew that I had to freeze them, but they got me cute trays and flavorings.”

“Hands up if Kurogiri’s ever offered to teach you things!” Spinner yells.

A door appears in the wall of the new room just so Compress can stick a gloved hand out of it. Actually, everyone’s got a hand up or is at least nodding. 

“They’re a pretty good teacher too,” Toga adds. “My teachers got weirder and kind of meaner around me the older I got, but Kurogiri just writes my name on my popsicle trays so nobody else eats them.”

“Himiko, honey, we’ve talked about this. Your teachers were being unethical, remember? You hadn’t even done anything yet- that’s quirk discrimination,” Magne says gently.

“No, hold on, Kurogiri’s tried to teach all of you?” Tomura asks before they can get distracted by another of Magne’s impassioned talks about society and the Japanese school system’s failings.

“Yeah. I think they got bored doing bar stuff all the time when the bar couldn’t have customers and none of us were really around to drink,” Dabi says. “I mean, I think only Twice and Compress ever really drank more than a couple of shots and Twice can’t drink much anyway.”

“Don’t worry, Tomu-chan, you’re probably still their favorite child,” Toga croons, giggling. “Hey, I wonder if we count as their kids in the family goal. I bet Tomura was enough trouble for five kids on his own.”

“Kurogiri, how long have you been babysitting Shigaraki?” Spinner calls and it’s really just Tomura’s luck that Kurogiri opens one of the windows just then.

“I have been Shigaraki Tomura’s guardian for fifteen years,” they say. 

“Oh my god. Oh my god, Kurogiri, do you have baby pictures?” Though Kurogiri shakes their head, Toga’s eyes gleam. “I bet there are pictures in Kurogiri’s simself’s memory system.”

“ _No._ ” Tomura just barely manages to grab Toga’s sleeve before she can bounce over to the profile tab. He’s not too worried about baby pictures He’s well aware he’s looked pretty much the same, give or take some height, since the age of five, though he knows Kurogiri has seen him through his extremely awkward adolescence as well, which might be an issue (he would have _lived_ in his ancient, gnawed on and picked apart Space Invaders hoodie if they’d let him). He is, however, not so keen on everyone seeing Kurogiri’s recollection of weak, nervous Shimura Tenko who trailed Kurogiri like a puppy before he understood how much Sensei was investing in him.

“New rule,” he says, “no looking through people’s memory systems without their permission and supervision.”

“Seconded,” Dabi says.

“Aw, not even for team bonding?” Toga asks, wearing her biggest puppy-eyed expression. 

“If it’s team bonding, you’ll have permission and supervision,” Dabi says before Tomura can even think about it. “Otherwise, nose out, kid.”

“You know what, everybody needs to shut up and pick a fucking goal,” Tomura orders. “The sooner we get out of here the better. Toga, give me a rundown on how this game works.”

As the rest break off to examine goal screens- Tomura keeps a very close eye on the portrait tab to make sure that no one else is looking too hard at it- Toga bounces over to his side and talks to him about rosebuds and rabbit holes and something about llamas that he can’t really understand as being important. Finally he cuts her off. “Are there heroes here?”

She claps her hands together. “Okay, so, yeah and no. Hero’s, like, a career path you can pick, but they don’t show up in the game. Like, NPC police officers show up to stop burglars, but heroes don’t. I think they were worried about being offensive? I know that villains only exist in the little newspaper articles and the closest career path to being a villain is the criminal career.” She’s really chatty about this and that’s how he knows for sure that she’s played this game a lot. He can recall following Kurogiri around talking about his own interests and he’s certainly listened to Spinner ramble about Stain for as long as he can stomach it. (His current limit is seven minutes and fourteen seconds, but he knows Spinner can talk for longer than that on the subject, especially if Dabi’s egging him on.)

“So this is a world without heroes, huh?” he asks, looking up again at the frozen birds. 

“Yeah, basically.” Toga’s nose twitches as she smiles. 

“Good,” Tomura says. “Do you think it’s a good model for society?”

“You sound like my government teacher now,” she says. Then, squinting up at the sky, she answers his question. “Maybe. I don’t usually play it for that, but it’s a good way to just pretend, you know? I have a save file like this, where Jin and Big Sis Mags and I live in a nice house and I’m a vampire and they’re my family. And nobody hates me; they just let me drink their blood and they say hi to me anyway. So. Maybe.”

“Then this might be tolerable.” He nods to himself. “What goal did you pick anyway?”

Toga scoffs, flapping a hand at him. “Oh, I’m a teenager. We don’t get life goals- my goal is to grow up well and maybe be prom queen. This game’s American, so they have prom. I saw a really good movie once where a girl got to be prom queen and they gave her a bucket of blood for it! Wouldn’t that be cool?”

Tomura has a headache.


	3. Going for Broke

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The rest of the team learns about what’s going on. Kurogiri and Compress decorate.

They run out of money.

To be fair, Atsuhiro hadn’t realized there was a budget limit here. Usually someone a little more grounded kept an eye on the finances- Kurogiri maybe and sometimes Magne. So when he makes a dramatic exit out onto the splendid little balcony he and Kurogiri had built, his intention only to announce the completion of the interior of their lovely new base, he hears Spinner say “Hey, we’ve only got fifty more whatever that currency is” and he freezes temporarily.

Now, if Atsuhiro had furnished the house in its entirety, this might have been disappointing news, but not necessarily terrible. However, Kurogiri had proposed perhaps allowing the others to furnish their own bedrooms and Atsuhiro had thought that was marvelous, especially when swiping through the furniture catalogue. There had been several items he could easily picture as belonging to one of the young people with whom he works and he knows rather well that some of them didn’t necessarily get the kindest of home lives or the most stable of incomes needed to furnish their homes in a way that suited them. 

So he and Kurogiri had stuck to making a house large enough to comfortably suit eight people. Perhaps Atsuhiro had gone overboard in planning out the extra bathrooms (he’d put in four because he knows that asking even eight _civilians_ to share a bathroom is cruel and unusual punishment), but Kurogiri is at least a little to blame with how focused they’d gotten on furnishing the kitchen space. The last Atsuhiro had seen of it, Kurogiri had been pushing a bar around the room, trying to decide the best place for it. His coworker was surprisingly interested in interior design. 

The problem is that, while there are certainly enough fully furnished baths and the kitchen is most certainly operational after all the work Kurogiri put into it, there aren’t even beds in the bedrooms. 

Thinking quickly, Atsuhiro opens the furniture catalogue again. No luck there; even a very cheap bed is worth more than fifty… really now, what _is_ this currency called? It’s certainly worth more than yen if a couple hundred of them can buy a cheap bed, bedding and all. Ah, fictitious economies. 

“Kurogiri,” he calls as he heads back into the house. “Kurogiri, I believe we may have a problem.”

Kurogiri looks up at him as he enters the kitchen. They’re pulling an entire kitchen table, complete with eight chairs, around the room, obviously in search of the best place to set it. “Do you think I ought to have chosen two kotatsu instead?” they ask. “I only thought that perhaps Dabi might have responded badly to the heating element. He is rather sensitive to heat changes.”

“Thoughtful of you,” Atsuhiro says. “Was the kotatsu cheaper?”

“Cheaper?” Kurogiri asks. 

“We’re out of money and we may need to make some quick changes to accommodate beds.”

Kurogiri looks at their table, then raps it smartly with their fist. Though Atsuhiro can’t see a hand under the mist that surrounds them, he hears their knuckles make contact with the wood and it’s hard to miss the little window of options that pops up above it. With a noise reminiscent of an old-fashioned cash register, the table disappears. 

Atsuhiro opens the furniture catalogue to look. The beds are no longer greyed out and, if he breathes a sigh of relief at the sight, there’s no one here to know but Kurogiri. 

“I don’t suppose they would enjoy all sleeping under the kotatsu instead?” he tries, looking at the price of the thing and then at the bed prices. 

Kurogiri fixes him with a look. “Are you volunteering, Atsuhiro?”

“They might find it a welcome respite from sleeping in the forest,” he comments, avoiding their insinuation. He does quite enjoy the finer things, but there is really no need for that kind of knowing look. 

Kurogiri’s eyes dull. “The forest?” they ask. 

Too late, Atsuhiro remembers that they lost Kurogiri well before they went searching for Gigantomachia. “We took up the task of searching. Doctor Ujiko thought it would be best if Shigaraki proved himself first.”

Kurogiri’s eyes turn to lantern yellow slits in their dark face. “Oh,” they say. They tend to have a similar response each time Ujiko is brought up. Atsuhiro never asks. He’s heard enough about Ujiko’s work (and seen enough of it in action) to know that there are any number of reasons why a person might take issue with the man. He might have some himself, honestly- Ujiko had given his missing arm a rather interested look that set the hairs on the back of his neck on end. 

Kurogiri snaps out of it first, saying firmly, “I will put away the bar until we have the money. For now, we need beds for the seven of you.” Without anything further, they cross the room to delete the bar and its barstools, leaving an empty space by the back door.

Atsuhiro nods and goes up to put beds in the upstairs rooms. By the time he comes back downstairs again, a bed in each of the five upstairs rooms, Magne and Toga have come inside and look to be exploring. Toga has her hand bunched in the fabric of Magne’s overshirt in the manner of a child younger than herself and, while she’s chattering away in a very lively manner, she only looks away from Magne in short quick bursts, like if she looks away for too long, Magne might vanish.

It’s understandable. Atsuhiro almost can’t believe she’s here himself. But this woman laughs like Magne and smiles like her and tucks her hair behind her ear like her- undoubtedly, it is their Magne who stands before them, as whole and hale as she had been before Overhaul’s arrival. Seeing her makes it feel like the frenzy of the last few months has just been a bad dream, even if the metal prosthetic pressed to the stump of his shoulder says otherwise.

“Hey, Mister Mister,” Toga starts. “Do we get to pick our own rooms?” She has a hopeful look in her eyes that makes Atsuhiro immediately crumple up his mental room chart. 

“Certainly,” he tells her. “I’ll take you on a tour while I put in the last few beds, shall I?”

“A tour sounds nice,” Magne says, accepting the arm Atsuhiro offers her. Her hands pause on the metal and she looks up at him with some confusion, holding his prosthetic between her palms.

“Oh, you weren’t there for this,” he says, forcing a level of jauntiness into his voice. “It’s an amusing tale- for the honor of a fair lady, I fought a young man who wore an extremely tacky outfit and a very ugly mask and would you look at what he did to me!” He produces a rose between his metal fingers and holds it up to her. “Of course, I adapted,” he adds. “And you should see the other guy.”

Magne allows herself a small smile, plucking the rose from his fingers and tucking it into the base of one of the buns in Toga’s hair. The gesture tugs at his heart, which seems intent on crying out whenever he makes any kind of eye contact with his long-lost friend. He would lose a thousand arms for this, he finds himself thinking fondly.

“However,” he says when Magne and Toga look up at him once more, “I do believe I was going to show you the house!” 

“Save it,” Shigaraki demands as he enters. Their fearless leader stops short for a moment, squinting around him at the grey walls and grey floors. “Wow. This is ugly.”

Atsuhiro bristles perhaps a little beneath his mask. “Should you feel the need to redecorate with what budget we have, I urge you to do so,” he says icily. 

Shigaraki gives him a long irritated stare. Then he clicks his tongue. “We’re having a meeting,” he says instead of addressing Atsuhiro’s challenge. “Where’s Kurogiri?” Before Atsuhiro can answer, he’s stalking into the kitchen, leaving the three of them no choice but to follow.

“We’ll take the tour later,” Magne suggests as Toga skips quickly after the irritable young man, casting little glances back at Magne the whole way. 

In the kitchen, Kurogiri is still rearranging things- the kotatsu are set beside each other in a way that makes Atsuhiro think that they’re mentally committing to the idea of meals as a group activity, which will no doubt be both utterly disastrous and amusing. The kitchen itself is very open- Atsuhiro’s idea- and light pours in from the windows set in the wall overlooking the backyard. Any visual divide between the kitchen and dining area has been created by countertop and that should leave anyone who wants it with enough space to cook. 

He thinks at least Kurogiri likes it, as they seem to be unconsciously following the sunlight around the room. For someone who looks like darkness made manifest, they do enjoy the sun. 

The rest of their little group files in, leaning up against the walls or counters or sitting under the kotatsu. Toga tucks herself under the kotatsu beside Jin and Spinner is only visible from the abdomen up, obviously chasing the warmth of the heating element. As Magne and Atsuhiro enter the room, she loosens her grasp on his arm and heads over to join them, while Atsuhiro goes to stand beside Kurogiri at the kitchen counter. Dabi chooses to lean against the wall by the refrigerator.

Shigaraki is sitting on the counter, much to Dabi’s obvious distaste and Kurogiri’s subtler disapproval. “So,” he says. “We’re trapped in a video game until we can complete the main quest. We appear to also be out of money.”

“Cool, broke in virtual life _and_ real life,” Jin says. “If I wanted to live like this, I shoulda become an artist.”

“Ooh, Jin, you can totally do that!” Toga says, clapping her hands together under her chin.

Shigaraki clears his throat. It’s something of a nasty sound and it makes Dabi wrinkle his nose. Atsuhiro wonders if Shigaraki has a cold of some kind. “If you want to be an artist, go for it,” he says, sounding irritated. “But if you have something that you _need_ to do to get us out of here, you better be doing that.”

“I already called,” Dabi says. “I start tomorrow.”

“Start what?” Spinner asks, cracking open an eye.

“Start making special lizard kebabs,” Dabi responds, making a show of eyeing him. “I’m thinking barbecue. My new coworkers will love them.”

“I’m not a fucking lizard, Dabi,” Spinner objects. There’s a soft rasp as he no doubt reaches for a knife and Atsuhiro sees Kurogiri tense, ready to throw a couple of warp gates. 

“Hey! Shut up!” Shigaraki shouts. “I want to get the hell out of here, so none of you better fuck this up.”

Spinner’s knife rasps again, hopefully due to being sheathed once more.

“Shut up yourself,” Dabi retorts. “I’ve already got my job, so I’m well ahead of you.”

“How did you even get a job?” Jin asks Dabi, ignoring Shigaraki almost completely. “You carry a resume in that raggedy old coat?”

“Sure do. Resume, hair dryer, my Boy Scout sash because apparently that’s what you think I am.” Dabi shakes his head. “It’s a video game, Jin. You hit the job button on your phone and pick the one you want.”

“No need to be rude,” Magne chides, though she’s laughing a little and Jin looks comically offended as he smacks her shoulder lightly.

“Can you all just please shut up and do what I’m telling you to do?” Shigaraki asks. “For once?”

“Shigaraki, with all due respect, aren’t you ready to just fucking drop?” Spinner shoots back. “You’ve been getting the shit kicked out of you for the past two weeks by a literal giant. Don’t you want to just rest a little?”

“I’ll rest when hero society has been eradicated,” Shigaraki says flatly. 

“Ooh, edgy,” Dabi mumbles and, really, if that isn’t the pot mocking the kettle, Atsuhiro doesn’t know what is.

Shigaraki doesn’t seem to hear him or is otherwise ignoring him, even though Toga’s snickering about it. “Dabi got a job. Great. Everyone else who needs a job, get one. The rest of you- figure out what you need. Make a list. Ask Toga if you need help.”

Toga preens, visibly reveling in her new role as advisor. Magne and Atsuhiro make eye contact over the girl’s head and Magne rolls her eyes, smiling. There are so many ways this could go wrong, really, but, despite Shigaraki’s urging, there doesn’t feel to be any sense of urgency. The sky outside is blue and Atsuhiro could have sworn that he heard the ocean. This world seems worth exploring, really, video game or not, and Atsuhiro does love to travel. He can see similarly thoughtful expressions on the faces of his coworkers. Perhaps this could be viewed as the vacation they should have gotten, rather than the forest trip from hell they’d just recently been on. It already has one up on the latter, given that there’s no giant swinging Shigaraki around by the leg and pitching him into one of them. 

“Don’t treat this as a vacation,” Shigaraki snaps, as if he’s heard their thoughts. “This is a mission. Make your tasks take as little time as possible.”

Atsuhiro nudges Kurogiri gently. “Listen to that! He does take after you.”

At the allusion to their somewhat disastrous ‘team bonding’ attempts, Kurogiri buries their face in their hands. “We can only hope he doesn’t get heatstroke this time.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The running out of money thing isn’t just for story- I really did go overboard in trying to make them a space to live in the save file that inspired this and they wound up all sleeping in shifts on a handful of couches in the living room. Not one of my finest moments.


	4. Chance of a Lifetime

Picking a life goal is slightly more difficult than Tomura had initially thought it would be. For Dabi, picking cooking had apparently been a breeze, but now he’s doing calculations and they’ll apparently have to stay here for at least twenty-five days to complete just one part of it. 

Toga had mentioned that maybe some of his traits could help him pick a goal and told him where to find those when he again refused to let her near his little profile picture. So now he’s sitting under the kotatsu as Dabi and Kurogiri mess with the layout of the kitchen ( _again_ ), resting his chin on his hand and scrolling through the pop-up window. 

He doesn’t like any of these traits. Most of them don’t even fit and they have stupid names to go along with it. Unflirty? He’s sure that’s not even a word. Sure, he thinks romance is a waste of time and he gets uncomfortable when he catches one of his teammates making moon eyes at another. But the little locked heart makes it seem concrete. It makes his skin itch.

Geek is somehow worse, but at least when he read that one aloud in disbelief, Spinner had smiled and turned his own screen around to show him the same one printed there. Spinner has good traits- Tomura had definitely seen Ambitious on there before Spinner had closed his screen and wandered out of the room, leaving Tomura alone with his (bad) traits. 

Upon seeing Childish, Tomura had closed the screen entirely. Personally, he doesn’t think he’s been childish for a while now. He’s been too busy. Sensei was defeated and Magne died and Kurogiri was captured and Tomura had to step up and do what he was meant to do or risk losing everyone else. Calling him childish for it is insulting. It should have been something like Determined- hell, even Stubborn would have worked. 

Anyway, Toga was wrong. He doesn’t know what any of those traits would do for a goal. So he says aloud, “Kurogiri, what did you pick?”

“Mixology,” they say, looking up from their conversation with Dabi. “I had assumed it would be a simpler goal concerning my prior experience in the field.”

“Prior experience, huh?” he repeats. That probably covers Dabi’s method of choosing too, given what Toga had said about Dabi making food while Tomura wasn’t around. But Tomura personally doesn’t have prior experience in anything but being a villain. It’s his purpose. Sensei had given it to him. He was born for destruction and chaos. He’s _good_ at it. 

“Are you still picking one?” Dabi asks, leaning on the sink he’s just yanked out of the wall. “Even after that whole speech you just gave?”

“Shut up.”

Dabi scoffs, then says something quietly to Kurogiri. He has a look on his face, sly and pleased with himself and whatever quip he’s making now. He’s not funny, no matter how much he thinks he is.

Kurogiri laughs and that’s as much as Tomura can be expected to reasonably stand. He grabs his screen and gets to his feet, stalking out of the room to find someone else.

He hasn’t seen the upstairs, so he turns that way, taking the steps two at a time to get away from the fake Kurogiri’s laugh. He has to remember that they’re not the real Kurogiri. He can’t let it get to him. Real Kurogiri wouldn’t act like that.

He looks in each room as he passes. Calling them ‘sparsely furnished’ would be too kind. Each bedroom features the same ugly grey walls and ugly grey floor and each bed is composed of slightly different color sheets on the same narrow bedframe. Sure, it’ll probably be better than sleeping on the forest floor, but not by much. 

He sticks his head into another of the rooms (this one turns out to be a bath) and hears Compress talking loudly. He can’t make out words through the wall- good, no point in being able to hear his teammates’ nightmares- but he can hear enough to know that Compress is in the next room over.

He opens the door without knocking and finds what looks like his entire League in the room. Twice is sitting with his back to the foot of the bed, eyes closed and mask pulled down. Toga is sprawled across his lap, messing with her phone. Magne and Spinner and Compress are sitting on the bed together, talking. Now that he’s in the room, he can hear what they’re saying.

“-so there I was,” Compress explains to a red-faced Magne and a hiccuping Spinner, “one foot through the window, my sleeve cut off, and a duo of police closing in on me. My partner had abandoned me. I had lost my eyebrows. And yet I _still_ somehow had that damn goldfish in my pocket!”

At this last, Spinner wheezes like he’s in a death animation, slamming his fist against his knee in an effort to get control over himself. 

“Hey,” Tomura says.

Compress twists at the waist, smiling when he spots him. He’s taken off his mask and now it hangs from around his neck like a gaudy bit of jewelry. “Hello, Shigaraki! How can I help you?”

“Have you picked out your goals?”

Compress makes a grand gesture with his hand, smiling through his balaclava. “Of course. I plan on being a master magician here, just as I am in the real world.”

“Jin’s still picking his,” Toga says before he can turn the question on them. “We’re doing pros and cons.”

“I’m also still thinking,” Magne volunteers.

Spinner stretches, cracking his shoulders loudly. “I picked a martial arts goal. I thought I could use what I learn here for when we go back. Give myself the chance to get stronger.” 

Tomura considers this. “You think we’re going to actually learn things here?”

Spinner gives him an odd look. “You think we’re not?”

“I think we’ll just be reset back to where we were when the quirk took effect. Mental quirks are like that.” The thought that time might be passing while they’re trapped here is not pleasant in the slightest, so he ignores the possibility. If this is just a mass hallucination caused by a quirk, that would keep everything much more manageable. 

Spinner shrugs, flopping to lie across the bed.

“You need help, Shigaraki?” Magne rests an elbow on Compress’s shoulder and leans forward. “All of the options seem pretty overwhelming.”

“Yeah, if you need help, I can tell you the easiest ones,” Toga offers.

“I don’t need the easiest ones,” he snaps. “And I don’t need help. I’m making sure all of you are where you’re supposed to be.”

Compress laughs. “If that’s all, I believe young Spinner should be making his way down to the dojo, hm?”

“I’d already be on my way if somebody hadn’t spent all our cash, Mister,” Spinner says lazily, stretching out further like a sleepy cat. To Tomura, he says, “Maybe you’re okay with only resting when hero society falls, but the rest of us deserve downtime, you know.”

“True,” Magne says. “We can’t be expected to work under these conditions. Violates the terms of our contracts.”

He glances at her, seeing how her lips curl in a joking smile. His skin crawls at it—how can she so easily wear Magne’s face and her smile? How does the quirk know how she speaks, with jokes all wrapped up in ideas of justice? Is it rifling through their memories of her to make up this version? However it’s doing it, it’s gross and invasive and he’s going to make the kid who did it suffer.

Returning his grimace to Spinner, he says, “Fine. Rest if you have to. I don’t care.”

“Tomuraaa, why are you being so grouchy?” Toga whines. “There aren’t any heroes here, you know. And no monsters either. We can do whatever we want! Don’t you want to do something?”

“What I _want_ is to get out of here,” he snaps. “If my fate has been tied to yours, I’ll never get there.”

Spinner props himself up on his arms and Mister Compress frowns, though Toga, the intended recipient of his wrath, looks unfazed. Rolling herself over across Twice’s lap, she rests her cheek on her hand and scrunches up her nose at him. “Don’t you want to do something _else_?” she prods. “Isn’t there something that you didn’t ever get to be?”

“No,” he says curtly. There’s something weird about the way the five of them are looking at him. It’s like pity. He hates pity.

Toga rolls her eyes and sticks her tongue out. “Okay, fine, be a criminal then. Emperor of Evil is a goal, you know. It’s not all of Japan, but I bet you can do it just fine.”

“Fine.”

“Fine.” Toga scoffs, reaching up to pat the side of Twice’s face and get his attention. “What about being a comedian, Jin? Or being a fashion designer?” Her eyes go wide. “Ooh, you should do that one. It’d be so cool!”

As Tomura pretends to ignore them, Magne leans over the end of the bed, tucking her hair behind her ear. “He already knows how to take measurements! Jin, sweetie, if you go into fashion, you have to make us very cute clothes.”

Twice opens one eye, peeking up at her. “Don’t count on it,” mutters his darker voice, while the brighter one says, in a very bad French accent, “Ah, Mags, you would be my muse! Vous êtes belle, belle, beautiful!”

“Aw, thank you,” Magne croons while Mister Compress laughs. 

“That was atrocious,” Compress says finally, wiping an imaginary tear from his eye with a thumb.

Twice points in his direction, nearly poking Magne’s sunglasses in the lens. “But I remembered all the words this time! Mark it down, Toga, point to Jin!”

Toga pretends to make a note of it. “So, fashion designer?”

“Yeah, it can’t be too hard,” Twice decides, folding his arms behind his head. “I can figure it out.”

“It’s just getting to the top of the career and making sure your sewing skill is good,” Toga assures him. “Can you sew?”

“I have to keep patching this thing.” He indicates his mask. “I think I’m pretty good. Didn’t pack my needles though. I never pack them.”

It occurs to him that he will look very stupid if Twice manages to make a decision before he does, especially when he did just make a speech about it. So Tomura finds the entry marked Emperor of Evil and quickly selects it just before Twice picks his own. A window pops up- probably the requirements- but he just smacks the check mark. It can’t be too hard if it’s just the same thing he already does with the League. 

It’s only when the window closes that he realizes that none of his allies are actually going to be his coworkers here. If Dabi’s going to be working in restaurants and Toga’s going to high school and the rest are doing whatever they’re doing, none of them are going to be working as criminals. They have other goals. They have things that they want more than their day-to-day lives. 

Should he be wanting more than that too?

“We should go to the library,” Toga says as Twice carefully closes his own goal window. Her voice shakes Tomura out of his thoughts as she continues. “Maybe Mags can get inspiration there. And they have computers and stuff in the park that we can swipe and get money for.”

Tomura’s eyes roll over to Magne, the only one left undecided. Maybe the quirk can’t figure out what to give her. Maybe none of them have any idea what she would have picked were she actually here. The idea cheers him a little, as irritating as it is. She’s not the real Magne after all- Magne was so driven to make the world a better place through any means possible. She would have already been on her way to finishing her part of the mission. He looks away before this cheap copy can catch him staring. 

“Good idea, Toga,” he says, though he barely finishes the sentence before she continues. This whole expertise thing is really going straight to her head if she thinks she can cut him off. 

“Well, I’d say we should take classes because if you take a class at level zero, it immediately boosts you to level one. But… we don’t have any money.” She sneaks a look at Mister Compress over the footboard of the bed and he sighs theatrically. 

“Yes, yes, I’m aware of my misdeeds. Do forgive me them, please,” Mister Compress mumbles. Then he clears his throat. “Of course, in order to leave the house, we must find a way to disassemble that barrier. Don’t think I didn’t see you go flying off of it, Toga.”

“Oh! Getting rid of it’s easy!” Toga takes a deep breath, then shouts, “Live mode!”

There’s a crash from downstairs, followed swiftly by Dabi’s voice.

“MOTHERF-”

The birds that had been flying by take an abrupt turn to avoid what looks like the sudden and miraculous appearance of a house in their flight path.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My Tomura sim does actually have the Childish and Geek traits. Something he does not have is the Evil trait, mostly because I think that would go right to his head. Here I gave him Unflirty too because my headcanon Tomura is on the ace spectrum and I’d like to explore that!
> 
> In terms of traits, I will be using Sims 3’s system: young adults get five traits, teens get four, and so on. If you want the traits list here, let me know- I’d be thrilled to write some.
> 
> List of LTWs:  
> Shigaraki- Emperor of Evil
> 
> Kurogiri- Master Mixologist
> 
> Dabi- a combination of the Five-Star Chef LTW and the Master Chef aspiration (please imagine Dabi but Gordon Ramsey as I do whenever I work on this)
> 
> Spinner- Martial Arts Master
> 
> Compress- Master Magician
> 
> Jin- (not a real LTW; I just think Sims should give us a real fashion designer career and I also think Jin’s sense of fashion would be very unique and fun if he had the resources)
> 
> Magne- undecided


	5. Chance Card

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Shuuichi helps timeline shenanigans be revealed and Toga’s a little wish thief.

The library was a bust. Shuuichi’s pretty sure none of the others are really big readers and he himself is more inclined to find answers on his phone. That didn’t stop Kurogiri from taking a stack of books. They still have one with them actually, all the rest probably teleported back to base, as they sit down on the picnic blanket they’ve helped Toga unfold. Toga herself has gone running over to the fountain, taking off her shoes and socks as she does.

Shuuichi examines the faces on his coworkers(? Allies? Friends?). Dabi still looks a little green from the taxi ride over. Granted, Shuuichi can’t blame him. The ride itself had been smooth, but the inside of the vehicle had glitched badly with the insistence from Toga that the taxicabs here could fit nine people. She had been right, and, sure, Shuuichi had personal space all the while, but he’s not sure if that’s worth the memory of the very dizzying glitched walls as the taxicab insisted that it was still the same size while still holding all of them. 

Mister Compress has taken off his white mask, tilting his face in its balaclava towards the warm sun. He seems completely untouched by any of the issues of their new circumstances. Sometimes Shuuichi wishes he could be a little more like that. Mister always seems like he has everything under control and it’s probably the showmanship, but Shuuichi never feels like _he_ has anything under control and envies Mister that.

Shigaraki’s hunched over his knees, looking cranky. His eyes are underlined with purple shadows, which Shuuichi thinks is expected, given the guy’s recent sleep schedule. He’s shed his heavy black coat, which is curled around his body like a cloth shadow. It’s only when he presses his face into his legs that Shuuichi realizes that he hasn’t seen any of Shigaraki’s disembodied hands around. 

“Hey, Shigaraki, where’s your, uh, father?” he asks. His question has Kurogiri looking up from their book sharply, their eyes checking Shigaraki over as if to verify, and then looking at his coat as if the hands might be there.

Shigaraki mutters something and just mashes his face harder into his bony knees. 

“What’s Re-Destro?” Twice asks curiously, leaning in to hear what Shuuichi missed.

“What?” Shigaraki lifts his face, looking perplexed. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“What’s Re-Destro?” Twice persists. “That’s what you said, right?” He rubs a knuckle against his ear. “Maybe I didn’t hear you right.”

“Re-Destro,” Shigaraki says slowly. “The Meta Liberation Army.”

Shuuichi’s isn’t the only confused face.

“We were fighting them,” Shigaraki says, looking around at them slowly. “Twice, you duplicated yourself. Toga got hurt-”

“She what?” Twice says in tandem with Magne’s “Who hurt her?”

“We were fighting _Gigantomachia_ ,” Shuuichi says. He doesn’t know who the hell Re-Destro is, but he’s pretty sure he’d remember Twice duplicating himself. Guy’s got such a block around the idea that if he overcame it, they’d have to throw a party for him. 

“We were what?” Shigaraki asks.

“You were what?” Magne demands. “Who’s Gigantomachia? What are you talking about?”

“Took the words out of my mouth,” Dabi says, stretching out his arms with a series of sickening pops. 

Shuuichi looks around the circle of them. “Okay, show of hands. Who remembers the Hassaikai raid?”

Twice’s hand shoots up into the air and Mister wiggles his fingers beside his face. Shigaraki lifts a hand, glaring at Shuuichi all the while. Dabi, lying back in the grass, lifts a hand too, the other over his eyes. 

Kurogiri and Magne, the only ones who don’t lift their hands, look around their little group. Magne swallows hard. Kurogiri’s eyes are wide and their book- a paperback- crunches beneath their fingertips.

“Okay. Who remembers fighting Gigantomachia?”

Dabi’s hand drops to the ground. “I was getting into the van to go wreck Overhaul,” he drawls, lifting his head when they look at him. “I don’t know who Gigantomachia is.”

“You’re better off that way,” Mister Compress assures him, grimacing. “You would never be able to forget him were you to encounter him.”

“And he’s been beating the hell out of us, huh?” Dabi checks around the circle, assessing the expressions he gets in response and nodding sagely to himself. “Yeah, I’ll pass, I think.”

“You’re not allowed to _pass,_ you-”

“And no one but Shigaraki remembers Re-Destro,” Shuuichi says, raising his voice above the sound of Shigaraki’s furious insults. 

“Are we supposed to?” Twice asks.

“No,” Mister says over Shigaraki’s snappish “Yes!” Mister gives him a look, then says, “You aren’t supposed to, no.”

“Yes, you are!” Fuming, Shigaraki yells, “Toga! Toga, get over here!”

“Reporting!” Toga says, clambering back out of the fountain and running up the steps to them. She’s got water running down her face, like she dunked her head in the fountain while they weren’t looking. “What’s up?”

“You remember the Meta Liberation Army, right?” Shigaraki’s eyes are locked on her like she’s his last hope for sanity. Shuuichi knows, in the way that everyone who works with Toga knows, that he’s probably not going to get it from her.

“Yeah,” she says, puzzled, plucking at her damp hair to keep the strands from her face. “But we’re calling it the PLF now, aren’t we?”

“What the fuck’s a PLF?” Dabi asks, now looking completely lost. 

“I dunno, but you were leading it.” With that and a cheeky wink, Toga turns around to go back to her fountain-wading, saying, “People throw coins in the fountain! Maybe we can save up for a thermostat!”

“Toga, what the hell, hang on.” 

Toga sighs and turns around again, putting her hands on her hips. “Tomu-chan, I am trying to provide for this family. Can you take a chill pill?”

Shigaraki’s mouth snaps shut. 

Dabi is suspiciously quiet, but his body is shaking like he might be laughing at Shigaraki’s completely flabbergasted expression. 

“How might I help you in that endeavor, dear Toga?” Mister asks, getting to his feet. A smart move, getting away from what’s sure to be pure outrage once Shigaraki remembers how to speak. 

Toga is, as usual, either oblivious to the chaos she’s creating, or sneakily encouraging it. “Try and steal some of these things, okay, Mister? And, ooh, Jin, Magne, can you go around and look for shiny things? Catching bugs and fish can help too. We just need money to get anywhere.”

“Isn’t that how it goes,” Magne mumbles. Then, louder, “In a moment, sweetie, I’m trying to understand what I missed.”

“I’ll help you, Himiko!” Jin says, bounding to his feet and loping off towards the edge of the park. 

Toga gives Magne an odd look at her refusal and her little fangs poke out as she chews on her lower lip. “Okay, but-”

“Toga, what do _you_ remember?” Dabi cuts in. There’s something shrewd to his expression.

She shrugs, but Shuuichi thinks he sees her hesitate in the moment just before. “Not much! Just talking to Ochaco! She gave me a cute little doll!” She rummages around in her pockets and produces a keychain. From the end of it dangles the ugliest All Might doll Shuuichi’s ever seen. Then it’s gone, shoved back into Toga’s pocket. She bunches up her fists in her sweater and presses her fists to her face. “She’s so cute, isn’t she.”

There’s something oddly flat about the way she says it. All the motions are right, but there’s no giggle in her voice or light in her eyes. She lowers her hands from her face, saying, “Can I go now?”

“Sure.” Dabi twitches his fingers in the direction of the fountain. “Knock yourself out.”

“I won’t!” She races back to the fountain, leaping in with a splash. As they watch, she crouches down to scoop up handfuls of coins. Shuuichi hears a faint series of chimes as she does and, when she turns to dive after another handful, he can see the green numerals shining above her head. 

“She’s off,” Magne says. Glancing her way, Shuuichi wonders if she meant for anyone to hear that or if it had just slipped out. 

Kurogiri hums in agreement. 

Dabi stretches out his legs over the blanket, neatly jabbing Shuuichi’s leg with the toe of his boot. “So, this giant. How big are we talking?”

Shuuichi shoves the offending limb away. “Very. He can fight for two days straight and only sleeps for three hours at a time. We have to fight him in shifts, but he won’t leave the boss man here alone.” He jerks his head towards Shigaraki, who grumbles wordlessly and tucks his head into his arms.

“And it’s just the seven of you?” Magne asks. 

“Six. I allowed myself to be captured earlier,” Kurogiri says. 

“A stupid mistake,” Shigaraki says into his arms. “Goddamn heroes. Like bugs.”

“And what about Re-Destro? What’s his deal?” Dabi asks.

“He’s a bitch,” Shigaraki mumbles. “Thought we were going to usurp him or something and stole the broker.”

“Is that what happened to Giran?” Mister asks. “He hasn’t been answering my calls. Did we rescue him?”

“I dunno.” Shigaraki’s shoulders twitch back and he gives a jaw-cracking yawn, trying to smother the end of it in the palm of his hand. “I think Twice got him back.”

“And you think this is all a mental quirk and that’s why none of us remember everyone else being grabbed away,” Shuuichi fills in. 

Magne looks thoughtful, but Dabi snorts derisively. “That’s stupid. That’s too much to pack into one quirk. There would have to be a team. Transportation, time travel, _and_ memory-wiping? That’s three distinct quirks.”

“Are you a quirk scientist now?” Shigaraki spits.

“Apparently more than you,” Dabi shoots back. “I thought you were supposed to be some big genius. Act like it.”

“Shigaraki Tomura, Dabi, be civil,” Kurogiri says warningly.

“Sorry, I don’t take orders from people who get themselves captured,” Shigaraki snarls, turning his ire on them.

Shuuichi feels his eyes widen. Shigaraki being kind of rude to Kurogiri isn’t new, but the venom in his voice is different. There’s something weird there. 

Dabi intervenes immediately, pulling Shigaraki’s attention his way. “That’s an outright lie. You’ve got All for One’s boot so far down your-” Dabi’s voice cuts off with a yell as he rolls away from Shigaraki’s hand. 

Shigaraki pulls his hand back- only three fingers extended, Shuuichi notices- and says unpleasantly, “Want to try that again?”

Before Dabi can (and he’s about to, Shuuichi can see that _I’m going to cause problems on purpose_ look in his eyes), there’s a shriek from Toga, who comes pitching towards them. “Look, look,” she says and pushes a pop-up window their way. 

Unlike the books at the library, which had been written in a vaguely blurred language that made Shuuichi’s head hurt to read for too long, the window has perfectly understandable text. 

Before Shuuichi can get too far into reading it, Kurogiri starts reading it aloud. “Himiko Toga has been spotted in the fountain in the park, stealing the coins. As she’s been stealing people’s wishes along with the coins, it’s up to her whether she wants to grant the wishes or shoulder the consequences.”

“Grant the wishes!” Toga says quickly. “Grant the wishes!”

“What is that, a side quest?” Shigaraki asks as the window crumples up. 

“Kind of,” Toga says. “I forgot there was a fountain chance card!” She looks frustrated, stomping her foot on the brick walkway and sending water droplets flying. “I was getting so much money too! And it totally cut me off!”

A new window pops up. “A citizen of Desiderata Valley, Natasha Una wished for a…” Kurogiri trails off, squinting at the text. 

“Does that say grilled cheese sandwich?” Magne asks. 

Kurogiri closes their eyes like the sight pains them. “I believe so. And Himiko Toga’s responsibility is to bring her one?”

“Ughhhh, grilled cheese aspirations,” Toga groans. “It’s a quest chain, so I have to get people things, totally random. And if I don’t complete it, I might get all the money stolen! Or get followed around by ghosts! I can’t stab a ghost!”

“What kind of game _is_ this?” Dabi asks, sounding almost amused. When no one answers quickly enough, he pushes himself upright. “Get your shoes then, brat, let’s go make a lady a sandwich.”

Toga brightens immediately and does as she’s told.

“Ugh, fetch quests,” Shigaraki grumbles, getting to his feet. “Ridiculous.”

“Okay, but escort missions? Worse,” Shuuichi points out. 

“Worst missions,” Shigaraki agrees, shrugging his coat back on over his shoulders. “If you code your NPCs to walk slower than the walking pace, you are a garbage being and you should code for me breaking your shit.”

“I like when the kids say things and I just don’t speak their language at all,” Magne says to Kurogiri. 

They tuck their book under their arm, offering her their hand as they stand. “It is indeed a fascinating linguistic adventure.”

“Don’t lump me in with them,” Dabi complains, waving for Twice and Mister to come back. “ _I_ don’t speak geek.”

Toga, back in her shoes and socks, runs back up to the group just as Mister and Twice reach them. “I got us a hundred simoleons from the fountain!” she says. “We can get a thermostat so we don’t freeze to death tonight!”

Kurogiri opens a warp gate and gestures for the rest of them to step through. “Very good, Himiko Toga,” they say. “Though perhaps that should be a concern for winter and not summer weather?”

“No,” Toga says seriously as first Magne, then Dabi go stepping through the warp gate. “Weather in this game’s _really_ buggy, so a thermostat is a really good investment. And we should make sure we all have our cold weather clothes set up! I don’t want to find anybody turned into a big block of ice!”

“Toga, every time I learn something new about this game, I understand why you like it,” Shigaraki says solemnly.

She giggles, despite how very visible it is that Shigaraki does not mean it as a compliment. “Aw! Thank you! I’m gonna get us all matching jackets!”

Shigaraki’s already partway through the warp gate, so he can’t respond, but Shuuichi can just imagine his face. This might actually be very fun.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have to issue a disclaimer: by now you might have noticed the new relationship tag. Here’s why it’s there: I’m a pretty big Magne/Compress shipper. I like to think they’re very fond of each other and you probably noticed it in the chapter before last. I’d like to pursue that romantic plot- it wouldn’t be a big focus and would definitely be slow burn as hell (I’m a weak romance writer and I have been, as the fandom elders would say, ‘flamed’ for it)- but it would be there.
> 
> I also have a ship to which I’m _extremely_ partial, and I might talk more about that in coming chapters if I decide I do want to incorporate it. 
> 
> In other news! AnonJ asked about a traits list, so here!
> 
> Spinner- Martial Arts Master  
> \- ambitious, geek, computer whiz, athletic, perceptive  
> \- high metabolism
> 
> Toga- to grow up well  
> \- excitable, hopeless romantic, outgoing, flirty
> 
> Shigaraki- Emperor of Evil  
> \- unflirty, childish, geek, mean-spirited, perceptive  
> \- dastardly
> 
> Magne- undecided  
> \- hot-headed, friendly, rebellious, athletic, nurturing
> 
> Twice- Tailor-Made Man  
> \- excitable, erratic, goofball, outgoing, friendly  
> \- muser
> 
> Kurogiri- Master Mixologist  
> \- proper, nurturing, unlucky, bookworm, neat  
> \- essence of flavor
> 
> Compress- Master Magician  
> \- proper, pickpocket, natural born performer, dramatic, lucky  
> \- business savvy
> 
> Dabi- Five-Star Chef|Master Chef  
> \- grumpy, ambitious, natural cook, dramatic, rebellious  
> \- essence of flavor
> 
> I mixed traits from TS3 and TS4 here- did you know TS3 had ninety-nine traits total, with about sixty of those being base game? Makes TS4 look pretty limited. Also the way these traits interact in TS3 is really fascinating- by combining grumpy behaviors and dramatic behaviors, I can basically engineer a sim totally likely to be Dabi’s level of apathetic while also being likely to do Dabi’s wild and crazy actions. (I’m not bitter, I’m not bitter, I say as I rant about traits in the notes for some godforsaken reason.)
> 
> If you left comments on the last few chapters, I read them! I love you! I’m having a rough time responding right now, but I love them! They give me joy and motivation and all those good things!


	6. Skill Acquired!

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Touya makes a grilled cheese and thinks about blackmail.

Touya’s not sure why it had to be video games or, more specifically, why it had to be _weird_ video games. He’s gathered that Spinner was a video game addict in his past life and he’s also picked up on the fact that some of the random gibberish that Shigaraki spews is actually game terminology, so they should really be into this. Toga was a wild card, but she’s always a wild card, really. Never once has the kid been predictable, except in matters of blood and gore. She gets this video game stuff too.

But Touya? He grew up without video games—they barely had television, honestly. He’s pretty sure they only had it for the news. Playing involved sneaking off to find childhood friends or crafting elaborate, quiet toy adventures with his siblings. On rainy days, it was reading and board games. All of this is nonsense to him.

The kitchen makes sense though. Not many bad memories in kitchens, not until the whistling of a teakettle turned into something more sinister. But he remembers helping when he was small. He could make tea and fold dough even with clumsy baby hands, so he figures doing it now with clumsy scar-stiff hands isn’t much different. 

Besides, if he’s the one in charge of food now, he can save himself a lot of grief later. His digestive system is a flaming wreck, his mother’s more delicate constitution fighting tooth-and-nail with his father’s ravenous fire and their horrible union birthing in Touya himself quite possibly the most finicky and sensitive set of intestines that have ever survived to adulthood. So being in charge of the food is strategy as well as self-preservation. It’s not his usual modus operandi, given that usually he’s not thinking of himself as much as he’s thinking about Endeavor and how to completely destroy his legacy. 

“Dabi, are you alright?” Kurogiri asks. “You have been turning the oven on and off for the past minute. Do you require assistance?”

Ah. Right. Kurogiri is sitting at the kotatsu, a book propped up before them. They’ve folded his abandoned coat too, setting it on one of the kotatsu cushions. He’s not sure _why_ they’re choosing to hang out with him when Shigaraki’s wandering around unsupervised, but he can guess it has something to do with the decidedly vicious outburst in the park. Touya had stepped in on autopilot to defend them. It was stupid really- as if Shigaraki would ever do more than snap and snarl at Kurogiri.

“I’m not Shigaraki,” he says. “I know how to do things like turn on stoves.” He turns the dial to light the burner, just to demonstrate, then goes rifling through the cabinets for cookware. 

Thinking about Shigaraki makes his teeth grit against his will. Not only is the little rat starting to act like he has rabies, but he’s also got Touya’s name to dangle over his head. He doesn’t know how he even _saw_ that. Had he been looking around before they got there? Does Shigaraki know about the rest of his family? He said he wasn’t going to say anything, but that’s just shorthand for “I’m not going to tell anyone your secrets if you do as I say.” Touya’s going to have to either get something to hold over Shigaraki’s head in return or he’s going to have to beat him to the punch.

When he stands up, he finds himself with his face half through another of those awful pop-up windows. He reels backwards, making something in his back pop obnoxiously loudly. This window, thank whatever, isn’t an ultimatum like Toga’s. Instead, it looks like a menu. 

He shoves it away. Fuck that, he’s going to make this sandwich the right way. He’s seen it made before, all fancy and colorful in the trendy districts. He needs, in addition to the skillet he’s already found, a spatula and a couple of bowls for the food dye. Toga’s gonna lose her mind. 

“Hey, where the hell _is_ Toga?”

It’s like she was waiting for him to ask. Suddenly, she comes scrambling into the room, Magne at her heels. The two of them had disappeared with Spinner and Twice almost as soon as they’d returned to the base, Toga still talking about matching jackets. But now she’s just grinning and Magne’s got a smile on too.

Touya knows something’s up. He considers himself pretty observant, really, but it’s also the fact that Magne’s face is an open book and Toga keeps giggling whenever she looks his way.

“Hi, Dabi!” she says cheerfully. “Whatcha doing?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” he asks, looking over his shoulder at them. “I’m making your damn sandwich, Toga, so you don’t get cursed. If you break my concentration, you’ll have to make it yourself.” He sets down the bowls he’s going to use for the food coloring and turns to face her. “ _Actually,_ if you have time to scheme, you have time to help. Get over here.”

“Aw,” Toga starts, slouching towards him, but then her phone chimes and her eyes flit back to the screen. The snort that erupts from her is only barely muffled by her hand.

Magne leans over her to look as well and Touya watches the smile burst across her face. 

“What are you doing?” he asks, giving the phone a wary look as he pours out little pools of food coloring. There are very faint cash register sounds in his ear, but he’s used to having very weird tinnitus—his ears look like someone cooked them and have the functionality to match. He’s _not_ used to being the butt of someone’s joke (other than the universe’s) and he definitely doesn’t like not being in on it.

“Nothing!” the two say, in unison. 

Touya glances over at Kurogiri, who gives him a flat stare. He imagines he reads there some sort of sympathy. Or maybe it’s just Kurogiri’s version of ‘better you than me.’ He turns back to the conspirators. “Liars.”

“We aren’t doing anything!” Himiko protests. “We aren’t!”

It’s hard to miss the emphasis there. “Who is?” Almost before the last syllables leave his lips, he hears the thump of footsteps. Magne and Himiko grin simultaneously and Himiko raises her phone.

A stranger comes slouching into the room, the frayed collar of his dark coat pulled up over his face. The cuffs of his jacket are silver metal and stitching of the same color winds over the fabric. His hair’s a shock of black around his head. Touya’s mouth falls open.

Then the stranger spins around and says, in a deep voice, “If you’re trash, at least burn and be kindling for my flames.” There’s a click and a little orange flame sparks up from the lighter in his clawed hand.

Spinner grins as the light from the flame flickers over his face. “Did I getcha?”

Touya nearly throws his pan at him. “Why the hell do you have my coat? Take it off! Your freakishly muscled arms are going to pop a seam!”

“I don’t have your coat.” Spinner twirls in place and suddenly he’s wearing his own clothes again, polka dots and all. “See? No coat!” Then he does another twirl in the opposite direction and Dabi’s coat flares out around him. 

“I think all our stuff counts as custom content for the game,” Toga says by way of explanation. “So we could all wear your coat at once if we wanted to. And it would fit perfectly!”

“I hate that,” he says immediately. “And what the hell did you do to your hair? Is that dye? Where did you get dye?”

“Huh?” Spinner touches his hair, then his expression clears. “Yeah! Mister grabbed it when he was wandering around the park. Toga told him to steal stuff and I guess his avatar is coded so that he has better luck with it than other avatars. So he just picked a bunch of pockets.”

“It was just in someone’s pocket?” Pretty big pockets if that’s true. He could use dye. He has a bad feeling that his roots are going to start showing soon and that could lead to so many conversations that he does not want to have. _Especially_ not with Shigaraki. 

“It’s packaged kinda weird,” Spinner says cheerfully, oblivious to Touya’s daydreams of throwing Shigaraki out a window. “Toga told me we had it when we found your coat.”

“I think we should all dress up as Stainy and scare Tomura,” Toga suggests. “If we dodge, he can’t catch all of us.”

“Please refrain from doing that,” Kurogiri says, sounding pained. 

“Ooh, or we could play Tomura Tag!” Toga does some weird little dance step into a twirl and suddenly she’s wearing Shigaraki’s black coat and her hair is falling around her face in a blonde parody of Shigaraki’s greasy mane.

Magne lifts her own phone, not even trying to hide her grin. 

“You NPCs would make for great EXP,” Toga hisses, lifting her hands in that grasping way Shigaraki does.

Spinner thinks this is all a joke, obviously, because he coughs and then assumes his awful mockery of Touya’s voice. “Hey, handman, try it and I’ll slow-roast your eyeballs,” he growls, falling into the intimidating stance Touya uses—one he hadn’t been aware looked as goofy as it does until just now. He’d meant it as an homage to horror movie monsters, specifically in the ancient films he used to sneak into the theater to see, but seeing it on Spinner just makes it look embarrassing. 

At least Toga’s imitation of Shigaraki is absolutely hilarious. “Yeah,” she breathes, really cinching that odd rasp Shigaraki has, “keep telling yourself that. I’m the leader here, aren’t I?”

“Huh,” Spinner-Dabi says, flicking his lighter open and shut. “Sounds like we might need to change that because… I don’t remember voting for you.”

At the extremely corny line, Magne cheers. 

“This isn’t a democracy!” hisses Toga-Shigaraki, lunging for Spinner-Dabi hands first. 

Kurogiri puts their head on the table with a dull thunk—admittedly weird because Touya wasn’t aware there was any solid skull in there, what with Kurogiri’s eyes doing what they do.

The play-fight is slow-motion and ridiculous and not much more than a gentle slap fight around the kitchen. Finally, Toga lands a good five finger smack to Spinner’s chest and yells, forgetting her Shigaraki impression, “You’ve been Tomura tagged! Now you’re Tomura too!”

“I think I’ve had nightmares like that,” Touya remarks drily.

Kurogiri sighs, then they stand up so quickly they nearly flip the kotatsu. “Dabi, the oven!”

He turns and finds the cheese has started to blacken around the edges, sending off an oily smoke. Sniffing it cautiously, he just flips the sandwich over to cook on the other side. “It’s fine,” he says, waving it away. “Just open a window. Lady who wanted it probably won’t notice.”

“Wishers can’t be choosers anyway,” Magne says, proving once again that she’s the only one in this damn league he respects.

“Wow, Dabi,” Toga says, leaving off wrestling Spinner to poke her head under Touya’s arm. She’s lucky his reflexes aren’t as shot as his vision or he might’ve knocked the sandwich right into the burner. “I thought you would’ve set an actual fire. Don’t you have the pyromaniac trait?”

He sets a palm to her head and pushes her back a little ways. “No.”

“Can I see what you do have?”

“Snoop. No, you can’t.” Mostly because they’re all named so embarrassingly, but also because if someone wants something from him, it’s vastly more entertaining when they try and bargain for it. “I’m making you your sandwich, isn’t that enough?”

“I bet you got the mean trait,” Toga says crankily. 

“You betcha. Pure evil, that’s me,” he says, lifting the sandwich out from the pan with his spatula and pulling it in half. Toga’s sulk is immediately forgotten as she watches strings of melted cheese in rainbow colors drip from the sandwich’s innards. Sure, he crisped it a little, but let’s be real, he made a killer sandwich. 

He turns off the burner, kicking open the cupboard with a foot and nodding at it. “Get me a plate, Toga.”

“Did you break the cooking system?” she asks. 

The plate clatters and he drops the sandwich on it, wiping the grease on his fingertips off on his baggy shirt. “What cooking system?” he asks in a bored voice, eyeing the sandwich critically. Just the sandwich on the plate looks dull, even with the colorful cheese. 

“I don’t think rainbow grilled cheeses are in the game at all,” Toga says, her hand sneaking out to touch the sandwich.

He thwaps her knuckles, not hard enough to hurt, but hard enough to make her yip. “They are now.”

There’s a chirpy sound and suddenly there’s glitter all around him. “What the hell?” he says, watching it cascade down around him, frozen in the hopes that it won’t suddenly vacuum-seal itself to his clothes the way glitter usually does.

(He found that out the hard way—thank you, Toga, Twice, assorted schemes.)

“Dabi, you leveled up!” Toga says, beaming. “You got the cooking skill!” She points the blade of her knife—had she been about to stab him when he wasn’t looking? Rude—up above his head. 

Slowly, slowly, he risks a glance upwards. Huh. That sure is his face floating up there in the window just above him. He does not like that picture of himself with the silly grin on. It’s not a smile that should fit his face anymore. He looks too weird like that, like his staples are about to rip themselves out of his skin. He lifts an arm, yanking at the window’s tail, ostensibly so he can read it properly, but mostly to hide that horrible cheerful smile. “This is bullshit,” he says, squinting at the characters. All the writing here is too small. He’s already got vision that’s just shot to hell—does everything have to be written so small? “I was already fine at cooking.”

“Probably not in any way the game could quantify,” Spinner says, twisting around and making his Dabi costume disappear. He’s found a comfortable sweatshirt and jeans somewhere and the former has a llama wearing a hat on it. “Toga, you want any company taking that over?”

Toga examines the plate again. “I’ll go ask Jin,” she says.

Spinner deflates. “Well, I was talking about me,” he mumbles, giving Touya a nervous side-eye.

Kurogiri hums again, though this time it sounds less like a note of amusement or disapproval and more like a bar of some song.

“You’re not going anywhere,” Touya says, leaning into the role of terrifying coworker with a grudge. “You get to do the dishes for distracting me.”

Spinner groans loudly. 

“Or,” Touya continues, letting a smirk curl over his lips, “I could torch your costume with you inside it.”

The threat nets him a suspicious look, like Spinner doesn’t quite believe him—annoying—but Touya doesn’t have to do the dishes, so who cares? If Spinner’s from a timeline that’s further along, it’s obvious that Touya either hasn’t tried to set him on fire or hasn’t really wanted to. There’s probably no real bite behind the threat for him. The Spinner that Touya knows snaps back at him, but knows that Touya’s still the guy who sets alight their scummy ‘recruits’ and might not hesitate to turn it on him.

He retrieves his coat from Kurogiri and heads out of the kitchen to explore. The rooms to either side of the stairs belong to Magne and Twice—the former has her orange work shirt hanging off the doorknob, the latter has most of Twice’s bodysuit laid out on the bed like a corpse. 

That makes the room to the other side of Twice belong to Toga, who has already started ‘decorating,’ by stabbing a knife into the door. Between them, the trio has taken all the bedrooms on the first floor. He’s not surprised. They liked to stick together before Magne died and obviously they’ve decided to pick that back up again with her return to the land of the living. 

The first thing he sees when he gets to the upper floor is Shigaraki, sprawled out on the floor in the hall. At first, he thinks the guy’s dead and his first thought is that Kurogiri probably won’t object to a Viking funeral as long as it takes place outside the house. Then he registers that Shigaraki’s snoring—like a pug or some other small snorty dog. That amount of congestion can only belong to someone living who winds up snorting dust every time he uses his quirk.

If he’s breathing, he’s not Touya’s problem, so Touya just steps over him (after he takes a photo on his phone for blackmail purposes—Shigaraki drools in his sleep, gross) and tries the handle of the first door. Another bedroom, this one clear of identifying marks. He chucks his coat at the bed. The next room over is a bathroom, one with a bottle sitting on the lip of the sink. 

He investigates and finds that the hair dye here reeks a good deal less than the boxed stuff he filches. He pockets it after making sure the cap is on. No reason to leave it in a spot where it would be vulnerable to Kurogiri’s attacks of cleanliness. He’s not dissing those, mind—if not for Kurogiri cleaning, he’s pretty sure he would have contracted some infection in the old hideouts. But the dye will probably be safer with him. Honestly, between the dye, the food, and a good place to sleep, he’s starting to not mind as much the fact that he’s trapped in a video game with a crowd of nuisances. 

The room on the other side of the bathroom contains Mister, who opens the door the rest of the way when Touya nudges it open with his foot. “Ah, Dabi! Hello! Come for a visit?”

“Nah, just looking around.” His words die a short death as he squints at Mister. “What are you wearing?”

Mister Compress has changed out of his usual ensemble. Gone are his white mask and his tall top hat, replaced by his usual ski mask and a flat newsboy cap. Touya thinks he might be wearing the same clothes in different colors too, but he can’t be sure. Mister’s outfits all tend to look the same kind of way, like someone who thought about running away to the circus as a kid and regrets never having the spine to go through with it. 

“Ah, this? Simply taking advantage of our unlimited wardrobes here. I was tiring a little of my giant-killer clothing and was afforded a change by this respite.” Mister brushes nonexistent dust off his sleeve, looking entirely too pleased with himself. 

“Where are all of you even getting new stuff? Did you rob a department store in the fifteen minutes it took me to make a grilled cheese?”

“Not at all! All of this has been obtained entirely legally, though some might say that being as dashing as I counts as a crime.” There’s maybe a little posing going on there, but in that goofy way Mister does when he’s looking for laughs. 

Touya snorts.

Pleased by the response, Mister leans in. “Here, I believe I’ve just witnessed young Himiko leave with Jin and Magne. This may be your best chance to get in and out without a fuss.” 

“Aw, Mister, it’s like you don’t know me at all. I love a fuss.” He ducks under Mister’s arm, glancing around at the room. He immediately spots the difference between this room and that of the others and heads towards it.

The dresser is set against the wall under Mister’s windows. He’ll probably get woken up by the sun every morning, a fate Touya does not envy in the slightest. The ability to sleep in is one he jealously hoards, even if most mornings find him still waking up with the sun anyway. The days where he can chase sleep until noon are some of his favorites. 

“This thing have infinite drawer space or something?” he asks, opening the top drawer curiously—

He stumbles around, finding himself in what looks like a dressing room in a department store. “Oh, what the _hell_ ,” he complains. 

He’ll never agree with Shigaraki again, but he’s right about one thing: every new, incredibly ridiculous development here gives Touya way more insight as to why Toga likes it so much.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I spent like a hour today playing dress-up with my versions of the LoV, Shimura Hana, and Shinsou Hitoshi while thinking wistfully of the Sims 3 prom mechanic, so that’s where I’m at emotionally. Sims 4 team, you absolute walnuts, where are my cute life events for kids and teens?


End file.
